Hemispheres

15 comments:

Gringo
said...

I also got right-brained, which surprised me. I am more a numbers person than a word person. The high school class that for me best combined high achievement with ease and enjoyment was Geometry, which had proofs all day and every day. Loved it.Geometry proofs involved logic, but they also involved vision, how you looked at something. Before you get cranking on the logic of the proof, you need to look at the picture first. But in engineering classes, I discovered that my 3-D vision of problems was not as good as my math abilities.

I have a very low tolerance for convoluted writing. If it is a writing maze, a gordian knot of words, I tend to throw it out. When I took the GRE, and was dismayed at the verbiage in some of the verbal problems, I chose as the answer the one that had the most verbiage. At the time, I chose the answer that sounded most like it had been written by a sociologist. That was apparently a successful strategy.

Both my wife and I came out right brained too. I suppose it's a little less surprising given that we are both architects, so I think we get weighed heavily by the ones that test spatial relationships.

Curious that no one here has come up left brained on that test yet. I suspect we would be an atypically difficult bunch to test for definitive left or right brainedness, being such talented and well rounded folks!

Okay, so I got right-brained, too. However, the idea that "right-brained" people are like this and "left-brained" people are like that has little basis in science. The all-knowing Wikipedia tells us:

"Despite popular psychology accounts of right and left hemisphere having different functions of creativity or mathematical abilities the functions of the brain are more differentiated between the different cerebral lobes than right and left hemisphere. Short of having undergone a hemispherectomy (removal of a cerebral hemisphere), the ideas of a 'left-brain only' or 'right-brain only' person are unfounded in research."

Well that's right that you're not one OR the other, but it's supposedly locating you on a spectrum. The problem with this quiz is that it only gives you the polar answer rather than a spectral range. My hunch is an awful lot of us here are pretty centered in our brains, and I think that's a good place to be!